YOU know how M&S in Inverness assumes an importance totally out of proportion if you live in the rural North?

SO when you are catching the bus up the A9 you have to go in and get a wee snack to sustain you whilst you listen to all the Golspie, Helmsdale  and Wick gossip which will swell like big surf around you – and you see a selection of toy shaped rolls with different fillings, and toy shaped boxes of sushi, cunningly marketed as tasters to get you hooked.  You end up getting lots of wee things and only liking one of them – but I guess the marketers know that you’ll buy a really big roll, or even two, with the filling you like next time…

Rik Hammond drawings at Orkney Museum

Anyway, this was in my mind during my wander around Rik Hammond’s work. He has never exhibited in Orkney, though he’s lived here a while – and this is, I think, a taster for the exhibition opening on 18 February at the Pier Arts Centre – sushi perhaps, rather than filled roll.

A neat bit of programming, I’d say. Rik has been appointed Orkney World Heritage Site Artist in Residence, focusing on the disciplines of art and archaeology, and the Pier exhibition will let us see what new work he’s developed over his time on the sites.

In the meantime, we have a series of drawings in pencil, pen, ink and wash, from the past couple of years, and a video of him creating a piece, to the sound of the sea.

‘Drawing’, he tells us in his artist statement, ‘for me, is an instinctive activity akin to the process of thinking. I tend to approach drawing in an experimental way, often treating it as an automatist exercise… enquiry, chance and experiment tend to be the basis for the decisions I make… (I have) little, if any, specific direction in mind.’

Statements of intent like this tend to make my heart sink; they have a vague let’s-shake-the-box-and-see-what-falls-out feel to them that’s a worry.

To read the drawings we proceed past a fine staircase, c.1820, with a long case Dutch clock in a niche – Stanley Cursitor’s paintings decorate the curve of the wall,  – ochres, greens, Orkney landscape colours. The exhibition room itself is painted a fairly pungent c.18^th century green. Hammond’s drawings, which are black and white with subtle wash tints here and there – green, ochre, blue – look at first glance to be rather brutally enclosed, by the background and then, on closer investigation, by the framing.

On the video we see him drawing round a soup plate, then letting go, free hand (it’s speeded up – I wonder about the wisdom of that.). He leaves the work, then re-visits it, washing over organic shapes, adding spiky squiggles or hatching. Of course you’re reminded of Jackson Pollock painting ‘free’ – but Pollock let his bedraggled canvases or paper hang as he left them, bedraggled at the edges.

Rik Hammond drawing

The Australian 20^th century artist Fred Williams also comes to mind – his drawings of You Yangs, Plenty Gorge, and Lysterfield Hills participate in the same random freedom of line – and at the same time pay homage to Aboriginal art and the mythic significance of certain marks and shapes, as signals and messages. Then there’s the late great Cy Twombly – all the marks he made, random and playful as they may have seemed, were bedded firmly in an understanding of the power of the line and its child, the letter.

Hammond is aware that his automatic drawing produces recurring motifs which may or may not be symbols. You can be a Zen master, a Freudian, a Jungian, or a child, and see things in these pieces to which you may want to attach meaning. They’re not a single act of expression – some are layered and scraped; but they do have a joyous simplicity which is very attractive. At its best, it is loose, playful shape making, and the occasional phrase –‘ 13 bodies’, for example – arise out of the picture, rather than being imposed upon it.

The rolling pencil provides us with dots and stutters, cook’s hats, cocks and balls and rabbit’s ears, prows and oars and birds – or not. It doesn’t matter. These random phrases –because that’s what I think they are, are like half a conversation which could be a poem, or a blurred snapshot which reminds you only of how cold your hands were that day; or a sound picture of some rock band.

I am less taken by the severely formal balls, circles and squares, the rulered lines, and a couple of very brooding black and grey studies, charcoal smudged. They don’t have the spontaneity which is this artist’s gift.

I have a real problem too with the framing here. There are some small studies heavily enclosed in pine frames. The artist perhaps liked the interplay between the four different grains surrounding the drawings, and the warm colour, a big band of it enclosing the blue grey Chinese wash and liquid ink shapes. I found it distracting, and thought it drowned the delicate intimacy on the paper.

I had the same problem with a group of circular drawings – like the one in the video. Why not leave an edge, and let us see what happens when the colours splash about over it? Tightly hemmed in a perfect card circle and then bound in a black frame, these lovely wandering pieces seemed trapped somehow, a bit diminished. Maybe it was on purpose. I thought they needed lighter handling.

I’m now very interested to see how Hammond has developed his work from these very personal, intimate studies. A year with archaeologists, watching their disciplines, walking in a landscape full of symbol and myth should bear interesting fruit. I wonder too what being out and about will do to his palette, which here is so subtle as to be almost hidden. As I drove home, a sudden great shaft of light hit the Ring of Brodgar, causing all sorts of extraordinary things to happen to land and sea, and shifting the horizon to boot. I wonder what he’ll make of all that. Not long to wait….

© Morag MacInnes, 2012

Links

• Rik Hammond

YOU HEAR the Irish lullaby very quietly before entering “Lullaby” in the temporary exhibition gallery at Orkney Museum and so just for a moment before seeing the installation, you are able to shift gear from what is the rest of the museum, and your awareness of what is to come is heightened, writes Clare Gee.

Sheena has created quite simply the most beautiful and most moving exhibition I have seen in a very very long time, and she has done it with a level of simplicity that belies the depth and layers of the subject that has inspired it.

Sheena Graham George - Lullaby (photo Clare Gee)

I must be upfront at this point and say that in my day job I have overall management of the arts, museums and heritage service for Orkney Islands Council and therefore manage Orkney Museum.  So this could be seen as me being positive about a show just so we can get more folk through the doors – although the rain and gales at the moment are doing a better job of that than I could do!

In reality I am writing this with another hat on (we swap hats quite regularly in Orkney!), as a fellow visual artist, as a viewer, and as someone who has closely followed Sheena’s work on this project for the last two years.

15,000 butterflies have been cut out of the pages of children’s books, and have been pinned to the walls of the gallery in a wonderfully beautiful way. The butterflies undulate and swarm, some drift away from the rest, some are alone.  They all look white, but move in closer and you see the delicate change in colour, and delight in recognising the books that have been used – Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland – characters you love from your own childhood emerge and then disappear again in this mass of life.

So, taken on its simplest level, this is a beautiful piece of artwork.  It works well in the space, which not being a white cube gallery has a level of warmth and humanity about it that some spaces don’t.  The butterflies are lovely to see as a whole and it’s fun to pick out words and images that you know.

But this exhibition has other depths if you choose to spend the time and have the inclination to be subsumed by it.  And I guess this will be different for eveyone who comes in to the gallery because everyone has had different lives, different experiences.

Sheena Graham George - Detail from Lullaby (photo Clare Gee)

The exhibition has emerged from a long term interest Sheena has been developing and immersing herself in, since a residency on Achill Island in Ireland in 2009.  She became aware of Cillini, the non-consecrated Catholic burial grounds for still born and unbaptised babies and children.  This discovery has led to a long and detailed research for Sheena and some incredibly sensitive and thought-provoking pieces of work.  Lullaby is the most recent and the first to be shown in a public space away from the residencies Sheena has undertaken.

If you view the exhibition with the knowledge of its history and motivation, it, for me at least, becomes quite overwhelming.  Each butterfly describing a life, a precious life, each one different and individual.  I read it on the level of all the children buried in the Cillini, but also of individual children known to me that had had very short lives, the people I know who have lost children; this exhibition can be uncomfortable and difficult as well as beautiful and celebratory.  And it is this balance of the individual experience as well as the world experience that makes this an incredible exhibition for me.

There were other links I made with the piece, I liked the fact that this exhibition is within a museum setting, and the butterflies all pinned individually remind me of natural history collections displayed in museums; again, that notion of precious individual species resonated with the notion of inividual lives being celebrated, although it also raised the question of how butterflies used to be ‘collected’ for museum display.  Individual butterflies being sacrificed in order to research and celebrate the entire species.

I also loved having the opportunity to reminisce about children’s books – how important they are to development of individual children and again, I felt the exhibition celebrated childhood through the written word as well as the visual.  I loved the sheer space created by piece in the gallery, the lack of clutter, the space to just look and contemplate, smile and cry.

One final point – the piece has been exquisitely made and displayed.  It is a show of the highest possible quality in every sense.  Sheena has described the installation of the exhibition with the support of the staff of the museum as a genuine collaboration.  The piece moved from being hers alone to a wider experience, and this has clearly been positive for Sheena and the staff at the museum, and the dedication and motivation shown by all benefits us as the viewer.

I would urge anyone who has not seen this show to go before it closes on 29 October.  Everyone who experiences it will have a different response to it, but this is art work of the highest quality, which deserves to have the largest possible audience.

© Clare Gee, 2011

The Orkney Museum used to be a house – Tankerness House. For three centuries this house was the home of the Baikie family of Tankerness, whose estate gave the house its name. It opened as a museum in 1968 and is an A-listed building. The Baikie Library and Drawing Room gives the visitor an idea of how the house looked when it was a family home.

ANYONE who knows Orkney knows there is a constant unfolding drama of weather played over huge seas and skies uninterrupted by wind breaks or buildings.

Sylvia Hays admits she sets herself constant challenges in attempting to depict this environment, and battles with self-inflicted problems. She walks a tightrope between representation and abstraction, struggles to simplify without reducing the surface to pretty colours and horizontal stripes, and loves the dilemma.

Sylvia Hays - Towards Eday

An American who has lived in Orkney since 2002, she has chosen this place for the freedom of expression it gives. She explains: “The paintings are landscape studies where the sea and the sky are as important as the land itself.

“I am a collector of oxymorons and dilemmas. To paint without an ambition to solve self-inflicted problems and contradictions would be to paint with no point. For me, painting begins in Orkney. Just as here the North Sea meets the Atlantic, my American youth, influenced by space and scale, by a sense of awe before a Rothko as well as work of the Hudson River school with its sense of “an unappropriated world”, meets what I hope has become a European sensibility.

“I can only speak of my hopes and ambitions; what visions are in my head remain tantalizingly unrealized and are what keeps me painting.”

The visions we have in this show are of sometimes huge skies, sometimes huge seas – in fact so huge that the largest piece, Warebeth, measures 148cm by 213cm. Rich golden ruts gouged in paint could be land scourged by plough or sea strafed by storm.

In Deer Sound, the sound is a thin strip of blue dominated by the earth. Sky rules in Passing Cloud, while the isle of Gairsay rises spectrally like Avalon or the mystical isle of the Finnfolk. In Cloud Morning Gairsay, the sky is more Turner-esque, while in Walking in Papay, the style is more representational.

Sky and sea are abandoned in Corrugated (Ness), an intimate study in which iron peels through time from the wooden wartime huts. Seawind Autumn brings moodiness with lonely huts on the edge of an eerie moor, backed by dark skies with a glint of low-lying sun hitting a roof.

Emotional riches and feeling are here among the brushstrokes.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

A RAPID spurt of plant growth and the bleached bones of a seal are two of the details artist Celia Clark has zoomed into with her camera lens.

Here is nature close-up and personal in a series of stunningly attractive studies created by digitally manipulating images, reworking the colour, tone and texture to create an abstract version and printing these onto canvas.

Detail from Celia Clark's Seal's Fate (photo Catherine Turnbull)

Long Grass viewed at short range appears to have brush strokes reminiscent of an Impressionist painting. Stand across the exhibition room and the cotton-style grasses swim into sharper relief and focus. It’s uncanny and hauntingly beautiful.

An old stone dyke stands out in 3-D relief, to be enjoyed without the glasses, with the lichen transformed from green to orange.

The slender bones of the aforementioned Seal’s Fate become a thing of beauty, lying in a shroud of blue beach. The fluidness of water is blown huge in big bubbles and the vividness of a growth spurt in Reaching Out is another eye-catcher.

Celia Clark's Feeling The Cold (courtesy of the artist)

Ammonites and other fossil shells offer remarkable details and you can feel the cold at the icy blue of the water spout. Orkney’s natural world is the inspiration for a large range of ground from the jagged edges of a cliff face to an abstract of a swan feeding.

This is the artist Celia Clark’s (nee MacInnes) first solo exhibition, and judging by the number of red dots and comments in the exhibition visitor’s book, has been very well received.

Celia studied sculpture and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art and graduated in 2000. Although sculpture was her main area of work she also spent time during her studies developing photography and printmaking skills.

Her current way of working stems from these earlier interests in photography and her love of the finished graphic quality of screen printing, as she explains:

“My work frequently focuses on small subject matter which is then enlarged, offering the viewer a much more unusual vantage point.  Ultimately it is presenting the viewer an original take on very varied subject matter.”

The work is available on canvas (A1) or in print (A3).

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

Links

• Orkney Museum

I LIKE literate art; works that inhabit lots of references comfortably, competently, and in an understated, not a show-offy kind of way. The school of ‘see me, see what I can do with ironic postmodern references to baffle you poor viewers plus a bit of ecology thrown in for relevance and to net me loads of dosh’ is not for me.

The Language of Saints exhibition (photo - Orkney Media Group)

I like to feel I’m being taken on a walk by an enthusiast who reckons I might share delight in some of the views on offer, and might also have read some of the same books, and mused on the same sorts of existential angst.

This is what I get from Colin Johnstone’s work. It’s always thought provoking, odd, and beautiful. The new exhibition is called The Language of Saints, and you might be forgiven for thinking it’d be heavy with Catholic imagery – rosaries and plastic models of the Virgin with flashing lights and internal alarms. Fortunately, Johnstone is too subtle, and much too intelligent to inflict this upon us. Instead we get a visceral investigation into language, communication, the value of the printed word and the symbol.

The theme for the show may lie in the quotations from E M Cioran, from a meditation called Tears and Saints. He describes ‘seeing the invisible’, and talks about ‘the teaching of the long dead saints…the lack of their meaning today.’ ‘Thoughts lie in absence, and in people and things no longer with us’, we’re told; and then: ‘what does it mean to make art now?’ It’s about the importance of seeing – of having an active eye. The implication is that this is something we’ve lost.

Perhaps this could be a negative point of view – that once upon a time art allied itself with the sacred and had, as a result, direct communication with ordinary folk, in the days when it told stories and turned church walls into comic strips for the illiterate. It was a servant, a handmaiden, a step ladder to understanding. And now, with no shared meaning – or perhaps a multiplicity of meanings – we’re adrift, without a symbolic artistic language to guide us.

This is what Johnstone is grappling with. The saints are there – familiar ones like Francis, Jerome, Luke – and some I’ve never heard of. The challenge is to reinvent iconography. Here we have stained paper, ancient sellotape, brown and dried out, holding down clumsily dried and preserved flowers, looking for all the world as if they came from a child’s Nature Diary.

Empty circles direct the eye to nothingness, like looking through a microscope – and other circles contain exquisite Victorian engravings of animals. Saint Christopher has a depressed-looking, but beautifully tinted, Bengal Lori. Jerome has a red legged partridge. The flowers have lost all their colour; sometimes they are on the back of the paper, so all you see is a vague impression, a hint of the juice and vitality they once had.

Saint Lucy the virgin is slightly battered – her cream paper is discoloured; she gets no flowers. St Stephen has a bosky black side to him; Saint Luke seems to have secrets hidden behind him. You want to come back and back. The juxtaposition of the Victorian prints – so Darwinian, obsessive in their perfection and cataloguing (each one has a number and a tag) and the faded flowers can’t help but make you think about what’s permanent and what fades.

Dodos come to mind, and Huxley and monkeys, and Darwin’s own struggle with evolution and faith. It’s even instructive that I’m wondering – which animal was associated with Luke? Who was Rose of Lima and why has she got such a fine crown? That’s the point – some sort of easy commerce with the world of the fantastic has been lost.

PLEASE DO NOT HANDLE, the shop sign says, in a Dickensian lettercase, black and peremptory. But handle we must; the Bible dictionaries, the manipulated book illustrations. Language is everywhere, being disturbed – the three studies of Shaker herbs, for example, are elusive and yet full of meaning; the Pitcher plant, we’re told, is Eve’s Cup, Adam’s Flytrap. Is this a real Shaker herb? The simple design inhabits Shaker philosophy, so different from the iconography of the saints – but the words are rich and complex, bursting with a back-story.

There are table display cases here – again a kind of referring back to the old way of showing things in museums – and they’re full of richness. This is the artist as archivist and chronicler, saving things – sometimes a reptile, sometimes just a bit of a tail or a beak, sometimes an empty space.

‘Boy Gathering Fungus’, for example, plays with texture in a most assured way – a mushroomy growth clings like a butterfly to a bit of wood; the richness of a Masonic scarf, Lincoln green, the Ancient Order of Foresters, hints at ritual, and at the same time feeds the senses – makes you think of spring, grass, renewal – and then there’s a tiny skull. None of your Damien Hirst stuff, just a small memento mori. It’s a complete poem in a case.

There’s much more to enjoy and ponder over in this fine show. Johnstone deserves to be better known. We need artists who are looking hard at the past and reminding us of some of the wisdom and simplicity we’ve lost.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Orkney Museum

Circling The Square premises at Artdogs in Maine

THIS EXHIBITION is the result of a serendipitous accident – an American printmaker, Jennifer Strode, with half an hour to kill at the end of her Orkney holiday, pops into the Porteous Brae Gallery in Stromness while waiting for the ferry.

There’s work in there she really likes, and before she knows it she’s introduced to the maker, Carol Dunbar, who works just down the road at The Pier. Result – a sparky conversation and a pledge to have an exchange print show.

Orkney’s Soulisquoy Printers exhibited in the University of Maine in October 2009. Now Circling the Square, from Gardiner, Maine, have returned the compliment, providing a varied and technically diverse show.

Information is minimal and I’d have liked to know a bit more about Circling the Square – it’s the other side of the pond, after all, and it’d be nice to know what brought these folk together, how they make a living, what their countryside is like, put the faces to the work… but the prints should speak for themselves, I suppose.

They are two very different set ups, that’s made clear. Soulisquoy is Council funded, though they own and subsidise their equipment. They’ve had an open access printmaking facility for 25 years, with a vacuum silkscreen table, a smaller etching press, a 19th century Columbia letterpress: but they’ve no exhibition space, so always have to find somewhere else to show their stuff, with all the attendant hassle that entails. There’s always the worry about the grant; always the unspoken determination to remain open access no matter what.

Circling the Square are privately run. They’ve got a reference library, an exhibition space, a Griffin etching press which prints full sheet relief and intaglio work; they’ve got non-toxic methods of plate creation plus facilities for silkscreen and mixed media. Though better equipped than their Orkney friends, the Soulisquoy model is something they want to emulate – they’re a relatively new group.

Orkney, according to Jennifer, is “like Maine without the trees.” The similarities are interesting – there are coastlines, and distances to travel in order to meet up; both economies are in transition, from fishing and farming communities to tourism and new technologies. I’m wondering already what distillation of their landscape, inner and outer, we’ll encounter, and whether it’ll echo anything Orcadian, or just define differences.

It’s clear at once that the exhibitors fall into two groups – those who are concerned with internals, and those who are celebrating the outside world. Beyond that, there’s a fascination with technique, which all share. Surely the next stage of the collaboration should be a wholesale crossover! Send Soulisquoy to work in Maine, and Maine to work in Soulisquoy, and see what happens… but that’s for later.

I like Karen Adrienne’s series of meditations, on, I think, fertility. Well, there’s a naked 18th or 19th century lady with a chicken on her head and lots more round her feet. She’s carrying a scrap bucket, and she’s surrounded by fibrous patterns like unravelling balls of wool. There’s ‘A Choice’ with the hint of a little yellow egg at the top, and then @The Decision’ – a bigger egg – and then the next two prints have big bright eggs. Maybe I’m wrong and that isn’t the story at all, but I like the sequence.

Diana McFarland (interesting, by the way, how many Scottish surnames there are here) also plays with the figure; she’s got a very chubby little Atlas, disporting himself amongst a series of slightly screwy cosmologies. The colours, pastel with the odd vivid orange, are clear and witty, like the work itself.

Phinnean Gaudette, on the other hand, chooses to picture herself, dressed up and dressed down, with writing about her choice of clothes overlaid on the image. Oddly, it tells us less about the maker than the subtler statements of the previous two. I feel the same about Ian Blethen’s ‘Secrets’. These are bits of white card – one a bit striped with grey – on bits of whiter paper. Having just emerged from a lot of white stuff which yielded no secrets at all, just chilblains, I don’t spend long on these.

Jennifer Strode likes portentous titles – ‘States of Being’, ‘Between Past and Future’ – but I like her simplest work, ‘Glimpse’ – a bit of a tree, dark in a green forest. Like Gaudette, she uses text, but it’s hidden in the background. There’s an atmosphere, here, a story beginning, like Freidrich’s best. This little work repays close attention – and brings us neatly to the other strand – the natural world and how these people respond to it.

J Natty Lazarian’s studies of trees show a real enjoyment of the physicality of the etching tool. I always find trees a bit threatening, and like his attention to them.

If you remember the Blue Peter fad, briefly taken up by teachers in primary and secondary schools in the 50s, of collecting silvery paper (Penguins! Tunnocks! Munchmallows!) and glueing it in pretty patterns, you’ll warm to Diana Willetts ‘Maine Gold’ and ‘Bright Fall Day’. These are what you’d expect to see, from Maine, about Fall – they’re delicate and pretty, using fragile leaf patterns and rich colours, but the unexpected, provided by Karen Good, is more compelling.

She gets the essence of the otherness of a different culture, in her stark single titled studies. ‘Church’ is just that – an etiolated, whiteout image of a clapboard church with the order of service on a post, but you can feel the heat, and the difference. Stromness Kirk it’s no. Susan Margaret Reidy works in the same way, but uses colour, and shiny stuff, to concentrate our minds on the picture – of her home, maybe, in different atmospheres.

Best of all, unexpectedly, there’s a kind of Chinese lantern effect going on in Ellen Roberts sassy, confident 3D work. ‘Turbo Tubing with Dylan’ and ‘Seaweed at Higgens Beach’ are tiger-striped, jazzy, full of shadows and sharp lines – this is a young and confident, strange and different take on the world, and crucially, simple. I did make a list of all the processes used in some of these prints – techniques I’d never heard of – but finally decided just to look. Believe me – you don’t need to be a slave to technique.

I’d love to see a joint exhibition, at some point. Crossovers and collaborations are what makes artists re-think things. For the moment though – catch this little exhibition. There are works I haven’t mentioned you may like even more than ‘Turbo Tubing with Dylan.’ But I defy you not to want to have a Roberts on your wall.

© Morag MacInnes, 2010

Links

• Orkney Museum
• Circling The Square

JANETTE PARK sets the scene for a major retrospective of the work of Orkney artist Stanley Cursiter for Highland 2007

THE ORKNEY Museum’s summer exhibition will celebrate the life and work of Stanley Cursiter, RSA, RSW, CBE in his home town of Kirkwall.

Along with works from the Orkney Islands Council Collection, the exhibition will feature works on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland, City Arts Centre in Edinburgh, Cursiter’s family and local collectors.

Lithographs, book illustrations, architectural plans and design will also be seen together with the expected landscapes and portraits. Accompanying the exhibition will be a programme of workshops and lectures for all ages.

A book entitled ‘Stanley Cursiter: A Life of the Artist’, edited by Pam Beasant, will be published to coincide with the exhibition. This has been long overdue and has been met with an enthusiastic response from all who have been approached to contribute. The book tries to show all facets of the man with articles from leading academics as well as pieces written by family and friends.

The book shows different opinions, or points of view. The exhibition will do the same by having extracts from the book as accompanying text for some of the paintings. If there is more than one point of view expressed about a painting, then you may just see both, so you can make up your own mind!

It is perhaps not widely known that Stanley Cursiter is the only 20th century Scottish artist to be represented in all three of the National Galleries of Scotland.

In the National Gallery one can see ‘Twilight’ (1914), a large scale conversation piece set in a fashionable Edinburgh drawing room; ‘Chez Nous (Self Portrait with Phyllis and Poppy Low)’ (1925) is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery; and ‘Regatta’ (1913) is in the Gallery of Modern Art.

Nonetheless, examples of Cursiter’s work in the National Collection allude only to part of his diverse repertoire.

Stanley Cursiter (1887 – 1976) had a varied career in which he excelled in many things. He was a leading figure in 20th century Scottish Art, but has not enjoyed the recognition he deserves. He was a successful portrait painter and landscape artist fluent in both oil and watercolour.

He was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland from 1930–1948, and was the last artist to hold this position. As Queen’s Limner from 1948 he painted many Royal portraits, always painting official scenes in a characteristically direct manner even if they did not suit the agenda of the commission.

This will be the first major retrospective exhibition of Cursiter’s work since the show at the Pier Arts Centre in 1987.

Looking Back: Stanley Cursiter – A Retrospective runs from 2 April until 29 September, 2007, in the Orkney Museum, Kirkwall

Janette Park is Curator of Social History, Orkney Museums and Heritage

© Janette Park, 2007

'She erupted through the trees' by Sheena Graham-George. (photo - Rik Hammond)

IF YOU ARE planning to visit this exhibition – and I would certainly recommend that you do – make sure that you have plenty of time. This is a show that requires the viewer to invest concentration, imagination and thought. As the show took a long time to create, within a very structured set of parameters, so does the viewing of it.

Sheena Graham-George and Jen Townsend met in the USA whilst they were both at Grad School. They were studying the very different disciplines of painting and metalwork jewellery, but the seeds of a plan to collaborate were sewn, and five years later ‘The Exquisite Corpse’ is the very strong result.

Based on a technique invented by the Surrealists in 1925, ‘Exquisite Corpse’, more commonly known as the game ‘Consequences’, is a method by which a collection of words or images are collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse.

Each collaborator adds to the composition in sequence and is only allowed to see the end of what the previous person has contributed. This is how Jen and Sheena have created this story, this fairytale, on a rigid timetable of creating one link in the chain, one piece of the story, every month for two years.

A very brave idea, and the exhibition was pencilled in to the Orkney Museum’s temporary exhibition programme before Jen and Sheena had embarked on the ‘game’. Neither saw anything of the other’s work (apart from a line of text and a fragment of image) until Jen arrived from the United States a week before the exhibition was due to open.

Their conviction that the work would hang together and make an exhibition has been borne out, and the result is fascinating.

The story is one primarily of a woman on a dream-like journey which begins in a maze, and several other characters impact, such as the Origami Man and the Moth Man.

These inventions have enabled the creation of incredibly potent imagery which quietly repeats in subtley different ways throughout the exhibition. Paper boats are manipulated into paper cranes, strong yet fragile, as are the moths, pinned like a museum exhibit, but if viewed in the reflective glass of the ‘tank’ they are in, they still fly.

Interspersed by the text, Sheena has created delicate, thoughtful, beautiful and powerful canvases for this exhibition, which sit perfectly alongside the exquisite jewellery and sculptural pieces that Jen carried with her so carefully from the States.

Certain of the images have stayed with me days after visiting the exhibition. A tall fragile ladder up to a tall, spindly but comfortable bed. The strength in repetition through the images of cranes, boats and moths, the malevolence of a man in a Morris Minor, and the disorientation of the maze.

Fate has lent a hand too, with the introduction – totally unplanned – of a snail, making it’s shiny-trailed journey across cloth, as we take our journey with Sheena and Jen, one step at a time.

Their conviction that the work would hang together and make an exhibition has been borne out, and the result is fascinating.

The artworks could have simply become illustrations to the story and therefore lost their own strength and vitality, and the viewer could decide not to accept the makers’ directions on how to view the exhibition – not to read the text, or to view arbitrarily.

None of these things have happened. The structure has added strength, and enabled a powerful aesthetic, the artworks add value to the story and change it as equals with the words, and at the Preview for this show, I watched many people silently walk from text to piece to text. They were choosing to engage with the story, the imagery and the potency of ‘The Exquisite Corpse’.

On a different note, and as a separate comment, I am struck also through this exhibition, by the coincidence and parallels currently taking place in the art world in Orkney.

A mile or so away from Orkney Museum, at Papdale Primary School, artists in residence Christil Trumpet, are two artists working collaboratively, using the theme of the game ‘consequences’. Two completely different collaborations creating completely different but equally strong and fascinating work.

There are other themes too being tackled currently by collaborative artists in Orkney, and artists working powerfully in text and image. This show is a demonstration of the good and strong work being undertaken in these areas of visual and written art. Invest some time to visit the exhibition before it hopefully tours to the other geographic partner in the collaboration – the United States.

(The exhibition runs at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall until the 28th October. The Museum is open from Monday – Saturday, 10.30 am – 12.30 pm, 1.30 pm – 5.00 pm, admission free)

© Clare Gee, 2006

Dress by Marion Yorston.

THE SNOW QUEEN, a magical winter’s tale, just right for yarning away the long dark nights of mid-winter. This classic fairytale from the pen of Hans Christian Andersen describes how the power of friendship and love overcomes the darkness of evil and corruption; themes that run deep in the exhibition of the same name by artist Marion Yorston.

The exhibition explores a diverse range of ideas ranging from romantic love to the often blighted prescribed state of women in Victorian society, interspersed throughout with landscapes and contemporary renderings of traditional classic fairytales.

The historical resonance of Tankerness House provides the perfect setting for this exhibition. The heady Victorian atmosphere redolent throughout much of the work is reinforced by the dark green walls and polished wooden floor of the gallery.

Marion’s background in interior design and work with Opera North is clearly felt when viewing the exhibition as a whole. Her skill at creating an atmosphere is demonstrated through her keen eye for detail; the pungent aroma of lilies, heavy antique furniture, ornate gilded frames, tassels and velvet, serve only to enhance the overall feeling of entering another era.

The work is beautifully presented and skilfully rendered, yet the attraction of Marion’s work is that it functions on a multitude of levels. She creates a particular world in which the viewer is invited to enter on whatever level they choose.

Like that of the Pre – Raphaelites the work is heavy with symbolism which adds a certain complexity to pieces such as Nature and Industrialisation or the large funereal centre piece, Fallen Parasemia, and its counterpoint, Sesame and Lilies.

It is this heady mixture of dualities – sex and chastity, passion and death, purity and corruption – that make these latter pieces so disturbing when viewed in a historical context. Redemption can be found in the series of small intimate drawings that portray romantic love. Reminiscent of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in their style, there is an enjoyment of line and decoration similar to that of Art Nouveau.

As Marion explains, she wants to “return back to different times, look through keyholes and melt through windows into other rooms”. This is an exhibition that achieves just that, and should be visited time and time again to fully appreciate the subtle nuances, layered imagery and accomplished use of materials. By holding open the door into her own unique world she is inviting us to cross that threshold with her.

© Sheena Graham-George, 2006